America seems to have no imagination for the evil which is ascending. Donald Trump hosted Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval office Tuesday and later at a state dinner. He said that it was an honor to be the Crown Prince’s friend and a “special privilege.”
According to intelligence by both the CIA and Director of National Intelligence, MBS had the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi tortured, murdered, dismembered and removed from the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul in suitcases. Donald Trump not only knows this but he has repeatedly helped the Saudi leader cover-up the murder; this time by attacking the journalist who dared to question the prince on the subject. Trump chastised her, answered the question himself, and told the world that “a lot of people didn’t like” Jamal Khashoggi, and summed-up the gruesome crime with the phrase, “things happen.”
“There is no justification to kidnap him, torture him, and to kill him and to cut him to pieces. This is a terrorist act,” Hanan Elatr Khashoggi, Mr. Khashoggi’s widow, said during a news conference on Friday.
But for Trump, this torture, this brutal murder, well “things happen.”
Ms. Khashoggi was joined at the new conference by Virginia Congressman Eugene Vindman, who called for the declassification of the transcript (which he read) of a phone call between Trump and MBS in 2019 – a conversation he said would “shock” the nation.
In addition, Trump himself, when interviewed by Bob Woodward about CIA confirmation of Salman’s involvement, bragged that “I saved his ass.”
Things like this brutal assassination don’t just happen; they are orchestrated, and then covered up.
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Indeed, Trump has done far more than save his ass. The Trump family has profited handsomely from this friendship with the Saudi Prince and Trump agreed to sell F-35 fighters to Salman, while Trump limits and handicaps arms sales to President Zelensky in Ukraine’s war against Putin. What Congress has still not woken-up-to is that these murderers are not enemies to Trump, he considers them friends, he celebrates them. The prince got the royal treatment, including a flyover of F-35’s, as did Putin in Alaska. Trump is animated and jovial with Salman and Putin and Kim Jong Un. He is dour and sullen and critical of leaders of democracies like Angela Merkel and Vladimir Zelensky.
For a clinician all of this is diagnostic evidence: his gushing over letters from Kim and autographed photos from Putin, while berating Ukrainian President Zelensky in the Oval Office and allowing subordinates to scold one of the greatest defenders of democracy since Winston Churchill. This behavior is not slightly odd or abnormal, it is overwhelming clinical evidence of a very inconvenient fact – we have the first president mentally unfit for office; but because personality disorder is the least known mental illness, because malignant narcissists can be charismatic, charming, and incredible salesmen, we could suffer the same fate as Germany, Russia and Cuba, under Hitler, Stalin and Castro.
Things like this brutal assassination don’t just happen; they are orchestrated, just like January 6th. I wrote a book about Trump and his mental pathology based on my military clinical experience. I illustrated his numerous antisocial and narcissistic character traits that would have required a psychiatric discharge or prison. It has since been proven that he is a sex offender and a 34-count convicted felon for fraud. He has pardoned every criminal who did violence in his name. In fact, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks pointed out earlier this year on PBS News Hour that Donald Trump “and Vladimir Putin together are trying to create a world that’s safe for gangsters, where ruthless people can thrive.”
On January 30, 2025, Donald Trump disqualified himself as president by pardoning all those convicted of seditious conspiracy against the United States. According to Section 3, of the 14th Amendment, you cannot hold any federal office if you aid or abet insurrectionists. Because personality disorder is permanent, we may need a third impeachment to save this Republic. There will be no change, there will be no end to his illegal behavior because his malignant character traits make Trump maladaptive to regulations, the rule of law, and the condition is incurable. Yet Congressional Republicans fall in line and refuse to stand up for the Constituion and democracy. The cowardice is astounding and mirrors the rise of another malignant narcissist in 1930’s Germany.
This is what Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist, meant when he said, “None of us stand outside humanity’s black collective shadow,” in response to a Western official who said they had “no imagination for evil” after learning about the horrors of the Holocaust. Republican Senator Jeff Flake warned his colleagues, as he retired from the Senate, that if they accepted abnormalities that they are complicit.
A future where Trump and his regime continue to amass power and militarize society while dismantling democratic safeguards is an evil we all must imagine in order to do everything possible to stop it. Apathy is not an option. Trump has given us a glimpse into America’s future; taking the prince’s hand in solidarity, the leader of the free world said, “I grab that hand. I don’t care where that hand has been.”
